It’s all too easy to try and quantify everything in medicine. We are, after all, under the widely held delusion that medicine is like physics. A thing that follows fixed, predictable mathematical models. A thing reproducible if only algorithm A is followed for this disease and algorithm B is followed for that disease.

This belief is also held by the government, which doesn’t want to pay for readmissions or mistakes. Because it is believed that all things in medicine can be known from an exam, some labs, some tests, and some studies.

Nevertheless, things happen. Disease are transmitted in public or by families. Medications don’t always work. Bodies change. Bodies age. Humans are non-compliant. Humans are suffering from physiologic phenomena we can’t yet comprehend. Viruses are synergistic with other diseases.

The immunity of our patients is affected by their happiness, their diet, their work history, their family. The algorithms necessary to make medicine anything like physics would be mathematically beyond comprehension. Read more »

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